This week is remarkable for two 10-year computing anniversaries: that of the Apple iPod and of Microsoft's Windows XP.
Both should be celebrated for their success and impact on consumers and tech sector. But while Apple's iPod will be celebrated in the history of its creator and – no doubt – the annals of computing history as a landmark device, Windows XP has become an inconvenience to Microsoft. XP has lived on despite outrageous circumstance and determined attempts by Microsoft to kill it. The OS is destined one day to become little more than a footnote on a version-history page of Wikipedia.
Launched on 23 October 2001 to skeptical critical opinion, the iPod breathed fresh life into what was an uninteresting and forgotten category of consumer devices: the MP3 player.
Apple's player teamed sleek, touchable, cigarette-packet-sized design (initially) with fingertip-scrolling and playing that quickly got you to the music. Apple married this with an online music, film and apps store while the design idea as well as the player leapt to the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad.
In the aftermath of Steve Jobs' death, it has become de rigueur to associate each of Apple's successes with his genius vision and Midas-like touch.
But it wasn't Jobs who came up with the idea for the iPod: that was entrepreneur Tony Fadell, a contractor and hardware expert who had worked at General Magic and Philips. Fadell is the man who dreamed up the idea to take "an MP3 player, build a Napster music sale service to complement it, and build a company around it."
Fadell shopped his idea to other consumer electronics companies but they didn't bite.
Apple did bite: it hired Fadell in early 2001, giving him a team of designers, programmers and hardware engineers to work on manufacture in tight secrecy with PortalPlayer, since bought by Nvidia. It was Jobs' infinite and exacting interference and nit-picking that gave us a player that had near total market saturation and is only now slowly sliding back to something approximating a commercially acceptable level of market share.
What differentiated the iPod against other MP3 players was the music store, the second component of the Fadell vision. In 2003, iTunes opened with just 200,000 songs but priced at 99¢ each. Support for Windows in the second-generation iPod in 2002 then took Apple's player to a wider audience
Microsoft's Windows XP officially launched on 25 October 2001.
As with the iPod, Microsoft had a heavy consumer focus for its operating system. But unlike Apple, Microsoft didn't keep the development of Windows XP secret. In fact, there was a lot of discussion by Microsoft and others about the significance of Windows XP.
Windows XP was important because it marked the final convergence of Microsoft's two code bases: 9.x for the desktop – which embraced Windows 3.0, Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME – and Windows NT, Microsoft's workstation and server operating system intended to answer Netware and Unix.
What gave Windows XP legs? One was these delays to Windows Vista and the hostile reception it received. When Windows Vista eventually shipped in 2006 and 2007, customers and businesses preferred to stay with the past.
Another factor playing in Windows XP's favour were delayed upgrades to Windows XP from older versions of Windows. Businesses shied away from Windows XP after it joined Windows 2000 in being savaged by Nimda, Sasser and Blaster worms plus their derivations, mutations and other worms that exploited network holes to crash PCs and take over people's inboxes to propagate their payloads. It wasn't until the Windows XP Service Pack 2 in 2004 that businesses began to upgrade in numbers and with confidence.
Ten years to the month after Windows XP launched, it has only just been overtaken by Windows 7 to become the world's most popular desktop operating system.
There were voices at Microsoft saying: 'You need to something about security', and they [management] said: 'We know what we are doing'. The people running Windows hadn't been though that thing before and they didn't listen. It was probably arrogance."
Just months after Windows XP, a humbled Bill Gates had announced the Trustworthy Computing initiative to shift from focusing on features to spotlighting security and privacy.
When it comes to music players, meanwhile, Microsoft has given up on the idea of beating the iPod with a Zune device, and is following Apple by putting its music player on a smartphone. In Microsoft's case, it's smartphones running Windows Phone.
As for Apple's iPod, it's not clear what happens next. With the latest iPod Touch, all that's changing is the version of iOS running inside and the – gasp – yes, addition of a white case. As Apple customers shift to the iPhone and iPad as a music-playing device, iPod sales are spiking down
